100 word minimum

So, like, it's fiction

But still.

I am annoyed by fake translator's notes at the start of novels. Memoirs of a Geisha has one, this other book that Oz picked up at the bookstore has one. Whenever I see them, I start hunting for a translator's credit on the title page. Then I google a little. ("This is so not a translation.") Then I get progressively annoyed. Being annoyed Lies in Fiction is kind of silly, but still.

I am a translator. My profession is not a literary conceit. Don't make up fictional stuff about fictional documents and pretend you've translated them when you made them up out of whole cloth. And if your work is published in another language, how is that fake translator's note going to be translated? Huh? Did you think of that? Of course not! What if your translator wants to write a translator's note?

No one ever thinks of the translators. Just ask the translators of The Satanic Verses who didn't get any protection after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

Oh, you can't. They're dead.

And try to avoid puns too, because those don't translate.

In contrast, fake editor's notes at the start of novels like the Amelia Peabody mysteries, for example, don't bother me at all. Possibly because I'm not an editor, but more likely because the notes are so over-the-top silly that there's no question that they're fiction. However, a friend of mine once admitted to being taken in by the fake editor's note at the start of a Jane Austen mystery, so maybe I should revise my irritation for her sake.

When I was seven

I was in the second grade in Harpursville, New York. It was 1974. On her desk, our teacher had some books, set up on edge between bookends, I suppose, though I don't remember what they looked like. One of the books was large and black, a hardback maybe three quarters of an inch thick. It was huge by my standards at the time, probably coffee table book-sized. I was fascinated with the book and asked my teacher if I could read it. She said yes, so I took the book to my little desk and read it for the rest of the school year. Over and over. I kept it shoved inside the desk with all my wrinkled homework and pads and pencils. This was probably pretty hard on the book, now that I think of it. At the end of the school year, I pulled the book out, dusted it off, and gave it back to my teacher.

This was a book of fairy tales and folk tales. Chinese stories, though I didn't make the connection at the time. I'm sure I had heard of China by the time I was seven. The book had heavy, glossy pages. Each story had a full-page, rather abstract illustration that I couldn't really connect with the story, but I spent a lot of time looking at them. I can't remember the title of the book, I don't think I even noticed it. The story I remember best was one about a woman who traveled in search of her husband who'd been impressed to work on the Great Wall. It was all very mysterious to me. Why the wall? What was the deal with cotton-padded clothes? A less abstract picture would definitely have been worth a thousand words.

When I tried googling around to see if I could track down the book, I found a page of Chinese folktales. It's not the same thing as finding the book, but I'm sure these are the stories.

When you were mine

I just finished reading War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull. It's an urban fantasy written in 1987. I picked it up after I read Cassandra Claire's post on Top Ten Fictional Relationships (Yes, we likes the books with the girl cooties, we does). I agreed with most of her selections, except that I'm just not as into the Fitzwilliam Darcy and Lizzie Bennett thing that most people are, I like Sense and Sensibility better. I figured I'd check out those of her choices with which I was not familiar. Hence, War for the Oaks.

Anyway, urban fantasy. Standard stuff (I should know). What ended up making the biggest impression on me, even more than the love triangle, was the fashion show. When the author describes in great detail what the characters are wearing just about every time they change clothes, that's what I call the fashion show. The characters in this book are mostly in a rock band and very hip. So their clothes, also hip. Hip for 1987. Pleated pants which taper to cuffs! Pink and gray! Men in teal! Waistlines that hit at the waist!

(Today people make snide remarks about "mom jeans" with the high waistbands, and that's eighties jeans they're talking about. But, let me just say, back in the eighties? The only people rocking the plumber's crack were actual plumbers.)

I spent the eighties in high school and college, so I was very aware of the clothes at the time, despite parental prohibitions against wasting money on anything trendy. All through this book, I was drawing the pictures in my mind and, hey, everyone looked really cool.

This brings up an interesting point for the writer who likes to write fashion show. I guess I do a little of that myself. But hip characters dressed in the latest, coolest thing at the time the book is written are going to come off as kind of dippy twenty years down the line. If your book is still in print. Then again, staying in print twenty years indicates a certain measure of success, dorky clothes or not.

Like a jigsaw puzzle

Today we made pie, which we were too full to eat tonight. Pie for breakfast, anyone? Today I did some cleaning. Not the dusting, which I should have done, but laundry and a bathroom. The dust is getting out of hand. It's not just that it looks bad, but when the cats walk around sneezing, you know it's time. Typical laundry list for a Sunday.

But I started outlining the rewrite for my historical novel and finished it up this evening. I'm separating out the two plot lines which kept tripping over each other and never coming together. I picked one plot line and stuck with that. I shortened the timeline. One of the problems was that the two plots wanted radically different pacing. One needed to take place over a few days to make any sense at all, while the other wanted a few weeks. Of course they couldn't work concurrently! I reduced the number of characters and fiddled with their backstories. Crowds might be more realistic, but they're awfully hard to juggle.

This new version will be shorter and I may be able to recycle some of the scenes from the early version. It's not like I'm going to have to write a whole other novel. Not exactly.

I think I've got it all together now. I should . start writing.

Etched in stone

The concrete sidewalk that slopes down along the edge of Libby Hill park has long been an obstacle on my daily walk. It's smoother than the spallstone road, but the roots of oak trees, decimated by storms over the past several years and now gone, have left a legacy of disruption. The slabs have been thrust this way and that. Here an edge protrudes six inches above its neighbor. There an edge hangs out into space, forming a surprise step down for the unwary walker.

This last week, the city had a crew in, breaking up the worst offenders and carting the chunks away. Then the spaces were leveled and framed with wood. Then metal wire mesh appeared. Yesterday, I saw that concrete had at last been poured and scraped smooth. Today the new patches of sidewalk were scratched with names and dog paw prints.

Some wight had scratched something that warmed the tarry cockles of my engineer's heart. A binary byte! 01100101, to be exact. Unless I was looking at it upside down, in which case it would be 10100110. A hex 65 or A6 (0110 being palindromic), or an ASCII "e" or "|".

That's what it says, anyway, but what does it mean?

Embarrassment of riches

I don't need to work this weekend. Really.

Another client, with whom I haven't worked for a while, wanted me to fit in an article about hard drive read heads. Oh, it's so cute, it's from the eighties! Remember? Like, back when a 5 MB hard drive was a big deal, so the tone of the article is all "Microfabrication is nifty!" Whereas nowadays, Microfabrication is an undergraduate level course.

I can meet their deadline without working this weekend as long as there is less of the goofing off while I'm supposed to be working. I will work hard tomorrow for a day off today .

In other not surprising news, Oz is still a fanboy.

"I noticed when I looked at the Netflix queue that all the Buffys have been moved up." Our Netflix queue is huge. I just keep adding stuff at the bottom and Oz rearranges it during the day when he's goofing off at work.

"Oh, well, I didn't move the Buffys up. I rearranged the queue," he says.

"By putting the Buffys at the top? I noticed that Pride and Prejudice hasn't moved up at all. I guess if it were called Pride and Prejudice and Really Big Guns, we'd have seen it by now."

"Or, Pride and Prejudice and Vampires. Or Pride and Prejudice and Cyborgs."

Yeah, I see how that goes.

Poor productivity

I finally finished up my translation of that really dull (and difficult) article. It would have gone a lot faster if I'd been able to concentrate on it for more than five minutes at a time. My attention span has really gone down the tubes over the last couple months. I have a bad Internet habit. But the next article will be better! It is computer vision, all optics and logic and math.

It's not just the Internet distracting me. I've been playing with my brain again. The characters and plot from my first (mostly but not ever really finished except in a very lame way) novel are insisting on a little more development. More backstory. New names, in some cases.

This is the fun part. Anything can happen. They can be anyone, almost, until the plot starts to do its shoehorn thing and impose requirements upon their actions.

I may have to start writing again sooner than I thought.

Johnny Depp dipped in chocolate

We (or I, mostly) just watched Chocolat, which did not actually feature Johnny Depp dipped in chocolate, even though that's how I've been referring to the movie since it appeared in the mailbox a few days ago. It did have Alfred Molina sort of smeared with chocolate, which is not the same thing at all.

Not that this is turning into an all chocolate, all the time blog or anything . But I'm kind of regretting not stocking up yesterday when we were at the candy store.

Anyway, I put the movie on our Netflix queue because of the soundtrack. One of the people on our local public radio station loves the soundtrack and plays it fairly regularly. I've grown to like it too, but I've never bothered to buy it since I end up hearing probably more often than I'd play it if I had the CD.

Seeing a movie after one has become really familiar with the music is strange. The images which developed in my head over all the times I heard the music did not appear on screen. How weird is that?

Truth in advertising

Today we went on a brief quest for Oz to find some blackest of black licorice. At the candy store I spotted the Yorkie bar. "Not for girls? What's up with that?" The "not for handbags" kind of threw me, because once upon I time I knew a woman who carried her Yorkshire terrier in her purse. But this candy has nothing to do with small dogs.

It turns out this is an elderly advertising campaign as those things go, but this is the first I've heard of it. Based on the description in a feminist analysis of the ads, it sounds rather on the offensive side. After sampling the candy, I must concur with the reviewers, who basically said eh. It needs more raisins and cookie bits. I guess "Not for people who like really good chocolate bars" wouldn't be much of a tag line.

I also read what Nestle has to say about it, and I have to conclude that Nestle thinks we're all really, really stupid. Where do they get this stuff? " . in today.s society, there aren.t many things that a man can look at and say that.s for him." [Insert standard rant to the effect that, what? All the money, power, political representation, good jobs, and by far the better selection of athletic shoes aren't enough? They need special, manly and bigoted candy wrappers too?]

I think I have a better opinion of men than Nestle does.

Monsters of the deep

On our way home from Millie's, I said, "Let's go look at the river." We were headed down Pear Street and the car was pointed in that direction anyway. We drove the rest of the way down the hill, across Dock Street, and into the Great Ship Lock Park. This park holds the eastern end of the Kanawha Canal and the lock to raise and lower barges between the river and the canal. The lock still works, but the canal can't accommodate big vessels anymore.

Today wasn't the best day for admiring the river and the canal from the park. The canal had been drained so it stank. Amazingly enough, there were a couple people dangling fishing lines in the dank, slimy puddle in the bottom of the canal. Why they'd want to hang around breathing the air, much less eat anything from that stinky puddle, I don't know.

The water level in the lock was low too. We stood on the edge and looked down at the water, green and oddly swirling. The drizzle dropped little rings in the water, the occasional fish flopped, but neither phenomenon could account for the strong eddies on the surface of the water. Oz's theory is that there's some current through there and some object underneath the surface causing the eddies. Boring. A Lock Ness Monster would be cooler. Imagine, a Richmond ichthyosaur!

Other people's words

The article I'm translating right now is so dull! It's about an algorithm for solving some insoluble problem and a supporting data structure. Interesting in theory, yes, but somehow in the execution . What's keeping me going aside from the prospect of payment? The next article may be more interesting. In favor of this article: it's like a review and extension of that last computer science class I took.

But, the dullness! I resort to eavesdropping to find something to write about.

Last night at dinner, I listened to the group of boys sitting behind me. First a discussion about what shape pizza to order. Boy A delivers a treatise on how the sixteen inch square pizza is a better deal because "it's got more area than the round pizza. Plus it's got these central pieces without crust which have more topping flavor because the crust isn't there diluting it." He didn't pull out a calculator and start calculating dollars per square inch, but I think he should have. (Oz and I do this regularly, though we've never discussed the effects of crust dilution.)

Somehow I miss the segue and suddenly they're talking in fake English accents about Nancy Boys. Or at least two of them are, Boy C doesn't know what Nancy Boy means and demands an explanation. Boy A again has all the answers. He begins, "A Nancy Boy is an effete intellectual."

Boy C cuts him off. "Effete? 'Effete' is not a word."

"Yes, it is!" Boy A has a definition at the ready. I knew he would.

Speaking volumes

I tried a new recipe today and the big problem I had was figuring out what sized baking dish to use. This was a really simple recipe, obviously, along the lines of "combine ingredients, place in dish, place dish in oven."

I looked at the measurements for the ingredients, a few cups of this, a few cups of that, and figured on about two quarts, maybe less, but I'd need to be sure to leave enough room for everything to expand when it cooks.

Then I looked at my pans. Hmm. 1.8 liters, 9 inches square, 9.5 inches round . So much for standard measurements. I could do the math, but there's a machine that will do it for me.

And now, oh, the window is open, and it's been raining. The breeze is damp and from the south. I can smell the tobacco curing in the warehouses across the river.

Mmm, cheese

We just had a Wallace & Gromit-a-thon. After we watched everything on the DVD, we tried to watch some of the things in French, but they only gave us subtitles, even though the menu said French! Nothing cracks me up more than cartoons in French. Especially talking animals. Because they're speaking French! That's, like, so weird. English, okay. Japanese, okay. But French is the language of . French people (among others), not fluffy woodland creatures. At least in my twisted mind.

But before the two and a half hours of claymation, I did other things, like getting that disk mostly defragged even without adjusting the partitions. I cooked food. I went for a walk. I got my work done. I made necessary phone calls.

Not so exciting. But I'm starting to obsess over another writing project. The excitement, she is in my skull.

Computers!

My living room is filled with old, dead computers, boxes for old, dead computers, monitors, boxes for other things, piles of books and magazines .

In order to give myself a feeling of productivity without having to use my brain too much (Brain already tired. Ugh.), I decided to add to the collection. I still have yet more monitors, boxes, and dead technology in the sitting room closet, after all, and why not make a clean sweep? Or, really, a dusty, coughing sweep.

Now the living room is filled with even more boxes and old electronics. Too many boxes to fit in the supercan, so I'll have to dispose of them over a few weeks. The computers and so on will go to the recycling center where they will dispose of them safely.

While I was rearranging all the technology, I plugged the quite nice speakers which came with my new system into my old machine which Oz uses. Now he can listen to Wait Wait . Don't Tell Me! whenever he wants. I also decided to see if I could improve the machine's performance. The hard drive is thrashing big time and, unsurprisingly, the problem turned out to be fragmentation. That partition is also too full to defrag. Still being productive, I pulled out the ancient Partition Magic floppy to rearrange the empty space on that hard disk and . the floppy is no good anymore.

I guess the next time I'm feeling productive, I'll start researching partition management utilities.

Winter camping

Oz rhapsodizes, "Oh, the cold! That's the great thing about winter camping. You get that fire going and then you rotate yourself in front of it trying to stay warm ."

I'm not buying any of that. I'm not terribly fond of camping in pleasant weather. "You know what's really great? Like when I went up to Northern Virginia last month and I walked into the hotel room and the heat was going full blast. And then I took a nice hot shower and washed my hair. And then I put on the food channel and watched Iron Chef. Now that was great."

Mystery of the disappearing toffee

Actually, not such a mystery at all, seeing as how there's only one of us likely to place a bag of candy that has been emptied of its last piece (and by "last piece" read "all the rest of the pieces, of which there was definitely a plurality") back into its holding location. Also, that one is not me. Me being the one without toffee. I'm so glad we've cleared this up.

Small victory today at the car wash. All the slots were full when we pulled in, so I pulled off to the side to wait. Two guys each pulled in after me and cut ahead. One of them even decided that the guy in the slot where he pulled up was taking too long and moved to another slot. The other guy ended up waiting behind someone who was ignoring the "no buckets or hand washing while other customers are waiting" signs. But my patience was rewarded! I saw a guy rinsing off a minivan in one of the slots where the line jumpers didn't go. When he pulled his floor mats from the clips on the wall and threw them into the back of the minivan, I pulled in behind him and we ended up getting the car washed before either of the line jumpers.

Documentarians can't go wrong with kids and animals. We just watched The Story of the Weeping Camel. Bactrian camels are the coolest, all shaggy and blaséhen the kids ride around on them. Also portrayed are kids who live in the Gobi Desert. At one point they play store. Much of the merchandise in the play store consists of sand.

Following directions

Last night I'm pestering Oz, making up for all that pestering he missed over the last couple months. "So, what should I write next?"

"God, anything! A blog entry!"

I just worked today, so I don't have that much to write about. Three things.

The morning started with watching my neighbor's guest's minivan get towed by the street sweepers. Then I pretty much worked and tried to apply myself to not reading stuff on the internet. I would be a lot more efficient if I didn't do that.

I watched TV. The human interest section of the Japanese morning news showed a bunch of ladies in a Niigata community center, marching along on little trampolines as they participated in a most unfortunately named exercise: Trampobics! They claim that this form of exercise was invented in Japan and they have their own sports organization, according to this list.

We got a Chinese restaurant calendar dropped off outside the front door. This one is rather frightening. Instead of a dog, it has a Jesus! Technicolor Jesus in 3D! Surrounded by little angels comprising only heads and wings. The calendar is printed on a sheet of flexible plastic which is poofed out where Jesus is.

The finish line

Last night I finished the first draft of my novel. Sixty-five days of writing (less a few days in December), 93,559 words. Also, a couple handwritten pages of notes made along the way titled "Things to fix." Also, characters who demand more story (I already gave them an epilogue, what more do they want? Another damn novel, that's what.) and plot arc-lets that want to grow! And be free!

Now what?

I'm going to set it aside for a month and then start editing.

In the meantime, I'll . I don't know. What was it that I used to do?

Baby, ain't I good to you?

I cooked today. Minestrone! So when Oz walked in the door, we had cheese and crackers, then fresh, homemade soup and the New Year's beer. While we were eating, the Red Rocker candy order was delivered and he was presented with a whole pound of pistachio brittle for, ah, Christmas. But he was too full of soup and fancy cheese and beer to eat any right then. I guess we.ahem.he will have some later. Actually, I ordered so much candy that they threw in a free sample of the one kind I didn't order. I have an embarrassment of riches.

Yesterday, the embarrassment of geek riches. I expanded my wireless network.

When I got the new PC, I set up the old one on another table in my office to use as an archive and also for Oz to play with. Of course, the playing he wants to do involves reading comics online and thus networking was required. He wanted to run a cable across my office, right across the path that I take to get to my desk. I took issue with that, but he seemed to think that just shoving the cable under a rug should resolve any issues with tripping. Ha! Cables! So I went shopping and picked up a USB wireless network adapter. On sale, no less.

When Oz walked in the door yesterday, he got to read comics. On the internet, over my high speed connection. Wirelessly. The prime beneficiary of this upgraded home computer situation is his employer, because he won't have to spend extra time on Mondays catching up with his weekend comics.

Resolved

The last time I made a serious resolution, it was 1998. I resolved to take at least one class per session as a professional development exercise. We all saw where that led. I've been too busy to make, much less keep, resolutions since then. Except for the Year of the Pie resolution (Make lots of pie! Get good at it!), which I had to break when I got tired of eating pie.

Given my past history, I'm rather reluctant to make more resolutions. I do have a few things I need to do:

Get better nutrition. (We eat out too much. I need to take time to cook more.)

Keep the house cleaner. (Since I'm making money again, I may resolve this by getting a cleaning lady again.)

Finish up my Novel in Progress. (The end of the first draft is in sight! My goal is to complete the editing and revising process by October.)

Work fewer weekends. Or, hey, how about no weekends?

Red is the opposite of white

The Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Singing Festival) is a four hour and forty-five minute Japanese musical extravaganza. It's wholesome family entertainment, broadcast every year for New Year's on NHK: a big stage show with all the pop singers, enka singers, and novelty acts who hit it big over the year, featuring lots of production numbers, in which nothing stands in the way of spectacle. Certainly not the bounds of good taste. The more horrific the production numbers, the better, as far as I'm concerned. The show is framed as a song contest between the red team (girls) and the white team (boys). The drag queens and drag kings get to pick which team they want to be on.

This year I noticed that whenever the song featured the word "baby" in English, that was the cue to send out the NHK children's dance troupe. Which led to some incongruous things, like the pop singer dressed in black netting singing "Take me, baby" (in English) surrounded by ten-year-old girls in pink and blue tissue lamédancing with heart-shaped balloons, and big plush cartoon characters from NHK children's programs.

Taken in context, this was not too bad.

There's another group, sort of a novelty act. They do costumes: long black coats, huge poofy rockabilly hair, black sunglasses. For their production number, they started out with a boxing theme. The group came out on stage in their usual costumes, but accompanied by boxers: on one side, a group of Japanese dancers in white fat suits, satin shorts, and boxing gloves, and on the other side, black guys (Actual black people, from what I could tell, as opposed to painted Japanese people. In this setting, would Japanese people in blackface be worse?), also in boxer drag, but with special goggles of big, round, white eyeballs, so they looked like cartoon black people. Then a boxing ring set piece, beneath a looming, ten-foot-high golden hand, is slid forward and some Japanese guys with the poofy rockabilly hair, but wearing American flag wrestling singlets (Because boxing is American?), dance around on it and sing backup. This continues for a while and I'm not really paying attention to the song, which is secondary to the spectacle anyway. I'm still processing the eyeball goggles.

Suddenly the camera pulls back to a view of the side stages that extend along the walls of NHK Hall and into the audience. Swarms of tiny people in black suits come running down the side stages and—"Oh! Are those children?"

Yes. And the inevitable English lines with the word "baby" followed:

"Can you master baby? Can't you master baby? Master master baby."

(All the lyrics are subtitled. This is what was on the subtitles, bad punctuation and all.) (I'm not making this up.)

So the children launch into their dance number amid the boxers and the singers, and the song continues. The lead singer picks up a kid and holds him while he continues to sing. On cue, the kid yanks off the fake hair, so the singer is left with the other part of the wig standing up all around the edge of his bald head. The child is replaced on the floor, the song continues. The children start tossing the fake hair back and forth over their heads and when it hits the floor, they stomp on it. All this while, the boxers and wrestlers are still shaking booty in the background. Eventually the song ends (Thank God!), the hairpiece is retrieved and the lead singer is carried off by his compatriots.

At this point there's still nearly three hours to go.

In the next hour: Darth Vader and the Dance of the Sugarplum Stormtroopers.